


sister song

by nearer_than_the_eye



Category: Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicle
Genre: Gen, Missing Scene, Oto Country, also a little fai/kurogane if you like, oh hey somebody wrangled the tsubasa tags thank you
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-04
Updated: 2020-09-04
Packaged: 2021-03-06 15:15:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,819
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26290999
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nearer_than_the_eye/pseuds/nearer_than_the_eye
Summary: “You don’t deserve it,” he says, too blunt and too hard, but he has to say it. “You don’t deserve this. It shouldn’t have happened to you.”Sakura chokes on her laugh. There’s tears in her eyes, but they’re not falling. “I don’t think that’s how it works.”A midnight conversation in Oto.
Relationships: Kurogane & Sakura | Tsubasa, Kurogane & Tomoyo of Nihon Country
Comments: 6
Kudos: 23





	sister song

**Author's Note:**

> alt title: kurogane&sakura sibling dynamic so good it made me write fiction with scenes and dialogue tags and everything. 
> 
> some chronological housekeeping: this takes place after Kurogane's started training Syaoran, but before Seishirō shows up and things really start going to shit in Oto. when EXACTLY that is becomes hard to place so I'm just...hand-waving a night of Oni hunting. it could have happened. also you would not believe how long I spent trying to figure out the layout of their house. also also you can rip the old spelling of Fai out of my cold dead hands.
> 
> title from the Perfume Genius song of the same name.

Kurogane and Syaoran get home a little past midnight. They creep in through the side entrance, both careful not to wake the house’s occupants. Syaoran heads upstairs with a nod and a smile to Kurogane. 

Kurogane lingers in the main room, enjoying the peace. An actual living place has been good for all of them, no matter the inevitable unrest and intrigue that follows Sakura’s feathers. The quiet of a house asleep is one of the many things he misses about serving Tomoyo. In the small hours Shirosagi Castle is settled, cracks and creaks mostly done for the night, and the halls are filled with nothing but stillness and streaks of moonlight. It means he’s done his job. Tsukuyomi-hime lives for one more day. 

There’s a sound by the entrance. Kurogane stiffens and moves slowly towards it, a hand on Sohi. They’re supposed to be safe in the house. He won’t feel safe until he sleeps in the same room as Soma again. 

He approaches the door from the side, trying to glimpse through the glass without being seen. The moon shine high and bright on the front step, and he doesn’t have to get too close before he sees the short, flyway head of hair, strawberry blonde bleached silver by the moonlight. He relaxes, but still pushes the door open carefully. He doesn’t want to wake Syaoran and Fai. Well, Syaoran, at least, almost certainly passed out after a night of hunting. Fai, though--he doesn’t think Fai sleeps all that much. 

Sakura looks up at him from where she sits when the door opens. She’s not startled, and Kurogane wonders if she could feel him walking towards her. Tomoyo always said she could, that his aura was too grumpy to miss. 

Sakura smiles. “Hi, Kurogane-san.” She speaks quietly; sound carries to the second floor easily. 

“Princess.” He nods and sits down next to her. “It’s late.” 

“I know. I had trouble sleeping.” She pauses, looking out on the little path and the dense bushes. He’s not used to seeing her so still while she’s awake. “You know, we don’t talk very much.”

It’s not an accusatory statement, just lightly observing. “I don’t talk very much to anyone.” 

“I guess that’s true. Though,” and here she smiles, glancingly mischievous, “You talk plenty to Fai-san.”

“I don’t want to, believe me,” he says, scowling. “He thinks it’s funny to provoke me with those stupid dog names.” 

Sakura shakes her head. “You’re so bad at taking teasing. You remind me of my brother. To make him really mad I would just tell him I was going to run off with--” Her lips purse. Her eyes close. 

Kurogane is struck with the image of his mother, frozen before the gathered household, unable to remember if she had renewed the wards in the East Wing. The pain, the mortification on her too-pale face before her handmaid had stepped in to supply the answer, attempting to smooth over the Lady’s mistake. 

“Sorry,” says Sakura, and Kurogane is furious. The person behind Sakura’s curse is indefinite and shadowed in his mind’s eye, but he sees the silver line of Ginryu flashing out with perfect clarity, a dark head sliding off a neck. A thud and then blood. 

“Well, anyways. I would tease and he would get mad. Brother’s a good man, like you.” 

He can still see the blood on the ground. “Princess, you don’t really know me.” 

“Don’t I?” she says, and there’s steel behind that. “You train Syaoran-kun, though you have no obligation to. You keep us well-fed, in new clothes, though you have no obligation to. You’re sitting here with me, in the middle of the night. You have no obligation to.” 

Kurogane shakes his head, silent for a minute. He looks up. The moon is too bright here. 

“I just want to go home,” he says, finally. He’s not sure he’s said the actual words aloud.  _ Back to my country, back to my princess _ , yes. But not  _ home _ . He sighs. He doesn’t know what to do with this. It shudders in him, the anger, the unnamable thing the anger masks. He doesn’t know what he should feel, under this different moon with this different princess.

“I don’t--” He pauses. Sakura stays silent. “My goal was to keep Tomoyo-hime alive. I didn’t live outside of that. And now--” He looks down at the back of his hand, the white warped scar. “I’m here. Which. Yeah. I don’t know. You and Syaoran-kun, you’re good kids. But I wish I was home.” 

“Tomoyo-hime must be quite extraordinary.”

“She’s the best of us.” Kurogane turns to look at her, resting his chin on his hands. “You would like each other.”

Sakura smiles big and broad at that. “I wish I could meet her.”

Kurogane shrugs. “Maybe you will. We’ve gone to all sorts of worlds. Once we get all your feathers, I can go home. Maybe you could visit.” He can see it already: Tomoyo tugging Sakura by the hand down the halls, talking a million miles a minute while Sakura laughs. “Yeah, she’d really like you. You’re fourteen, right? You two are the same age.” 

“I don’t have many girl friends my age,” says Sakura, a little dreamily. “I grew up with boys.” 

Kurogane snorts. “I grew up in a palace full of women. I could have used a brother to keep the balance.” 

“Oh, no, brothers are gross,” says Sakura, wrinkling her nose, and Kurogane can’t help but laugh at the sheer fourteen-year-old-ness of the statement. “Brother is always getting into my business, but Yukito-sama, our high priest, he’s always nice to me. Father too. And of course I always got on with--”

The pause, the line of her lips. 

Kurogane wants to strangle the universe for its sheer audacity to hurt this girl. What fucking right does it have to do this to her, to Sakura, who works so happily and talks so sweetly to every stranger, who promises ghosts she’ll clear their name, who Tomoyo would adore. 

“You don’t deserve it,” he says, too blunt and too hard, but he has to say it. “You don’t deserve this. It shouldn’t have happened to you.” 

Sakura chokes on her laugh. There’s tears in her eyes, but they’re not falling. “I don’t think that’s how it works.” 

“Fuck how it works,” he says, not thinking, but she laughs again. “Sorry. Shouldn’t have said it like that.” 

She shakes her head. “I’ve heard worse. I just--I know there’s somebody I love that I’ve forgotten. It’s the worst feeling in the world.” 

Kurogane can’t say  _ it’ll get better _ , because it won’t. He knows the deal Syaoran made. “You remember that you love them, though. That’s something.” 

Sakura sits on that for a minute, wipes her eyes with the corner of her sleeve. “Yeah. Yeah, I guess so. It exists, somehow.” 

“They still love you,” he says, because he knows it’s true. 

She meets his eyes, smiling again. “Ah, and you say I don’t know if you’re a good man, Kurogane-san.” 

He doesn’t know how to take something so delicate. He drops his gaze, curls back in on himself. “It’s just probable.That’s why I said it.”

“Okay,” says Sakura. Her expressions’s more peaceful now, something quieter. 

“I want to help you,” he says. “I wish I was with my princess, but you and Syaoran-kun are, yeah. Good kids. You deserve some help. And the mage…” he grimaces, pulls a hand over his face. “The mage doesn’t make me want to kill him  _ every  _ day, so that’s something.” 

“You should tell him!” Sakura says, half-laughing. “I’m sure he’ll appreciate such high praise.” 

Kurogane snorts. “If we keep talking about the idiot I’m headed to bed.”

Sakura laughs but starts to get up. “Oh no,” says Kurogane, hurried, “I don’t mean it,” but Sakura shakes her head. 

“No, I should try and get some rest.” She looks up at the window to his and Fai’s room. “And you should tell Fai-san to go to sleep. We have to get up at five to get the bread ready in time for opening.” 

“People get up too early in this country.” He gets up himself and rolls his shoulders. He’s gotta stretch more. He won’t be twenty-five forever. He looks back at Sakura. “You okay?” He’s not entirely sure what he’s asking. 

Sakura shrugs lightly. “As much as I can be. Thank you, Kurogane-san.” 

He nods and reaches to open the door for her.

They pick through the main room, careful not to knock any of the delicate tables and chairs. Kurogane follows Sakura up the stairs, checking behind them one last time.

“I think we’re okay,” Sakura whispers.

Kurogane shakes his head. “Never too safe.” 

She turns to face him when they reach her door. “Good night, Kurogane-san.” 

“Good night, Princess.” 

She smiles at him one last time and slips into her room. The door shuts with a soft click. 

Kurogane turns to his own door. Sure enough, there’s a faint band of light shining at the bottom. He sighs and pushes the door open. 

Fai is in bed, reading by candle light. The glow suits him: it picks out the gold of his hair, all the warmth in his pale skin. As always, he would be beautiful, if he wasn’t such a bastard.

“The princess says to go to sleep,” Kurogane announces, moving to strip behind the screen in the corner of the room. 

“Ah, Sakura-chan, always looking out for us.” His tone is off-hand, but a strong line of warmth runs through it. “I was wondering why it took you so long to come up.” 

“Yeah, we were talking.” Kurogane changes into his yukata--an actual yukata, not those weird pants-and-shirts outfits that are supposedly for sleeping in. Soft beds, real sleepwear. Oto has its perks. 

“What did you talk about?” 

Kurogane pauses. “Stuff.” He’s willing to share Tomoyo with guileless Sakura. Fai, not so much. He splashes water on his face at the washstand, dries, turns around to see Fai impassive in the face of the shut down. Kurogane is suspended, momentarily, in that distance between them, Fai’s eyes on him. 

The candle flickers. 

“Blow that out,” Kurogane finally says, and he walks towards his side of the bed. Fai sets his book down on the nightstand and waits for Kurgane to slide under the covers before blowing out the light. 

“Good night, Kuro-sama.”

Kurogane can smell the candle smoke. “Good night.” 

They face away from each other, like always. He listens to Fai’s breaths even out. Sakura’s moonlit hair glimmers in his mind’s eye; he turns the crystal light of it over and over in his hands. He imagines handing it to Tomoyo, saying,  _ here, here, a girl you would love. Look at her eyes.  _ The last thing he sees before sleep is Tomoyo and Sakura in his mother’s garden, holding hands. 

**Author's Note:**

> on [tumblr](https://nearer-than-the-eye.tumblr.com/post/628369776045178880/sister-song-nearerthantheeye-tsubasa/) . 
> 
> Just thinking about how Kurogane spent some of the most formative years of childhood watching his mother get continually more fatigued and forgetful and how caring for Sakura probably starts bringing up a bunch of stuff he'd been repressing since the fall of Suwa :) also definitely SO MUCH to the fact that Sakura’s missing her older brother and Kurogane has effectively left his younger sister. Fai gets to have mom dynamics (the good AND THE BAD) but Kurogane gets big brother dynamics. 
> 
> Lost my mind a little bit trying to figure out what honorific Kurogane would use for Syaoran--I went for -kun because it IS a man talking about a younger boy but AGH i'm sure there's context I'm missing. Why does nobody have last names in this stupid manga. Fai and Kurogane are sharing a room because canonically the kids are in separate rooms, and imo a) four bedrooms seems kind of extravagant, b) I love putting pre-Tokyo Kurogane and Fai in situations where they're waaay more physically intimate than they are emotionally intimate. Also it's my little headcanon that whenever they are in a three bedroom situation, they always let the kids have the separate rooms. There's probably a whole other fic about Kurogane and Fai negotiating bed sharing and their own cultural norms around it (like that it probably wouldn't be weird to Fai, growing up in a cold ~~medieval-ish~~ country), but that's for another day.
> 
> EDIT: OMG I FORGOT TO MENTION MOKONA. she's asleep in Sakura's room. she has no idea Sakura left. she's fine.


End file.
